Same PIN, different photos – NCA exposes Ghana Card anomalies

The Director-General of the National Communications Authority (NCA), Rev. Edmund Yirenkyi Fianko, has raised serious concerns over irregularities in Ghana’s national identity database, revealing cases of duplicate Ghana Card records with conflicting biometric details.

According to him, some records captured during previous verification exercises showed identical names, dates of birth and Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) but were linked to different photographs.

“In some cases, we found two cards with the same name, same date of birth, and same PIN, but different photos. Two cards have the same date of birth, the same PIN number, and the same name but different photos. So, one of them should be fake; I mean, it is not possible,” he said in an interview with TV3 on Sunday, March 22.

Rev. Fianko explained that the Ghana Card PIN is a unique identifier, making it impossible for two individuals to legitimately share the same number. He noted that even in situations where people may share similar names and dates of birth, their identification numbers must remain distinct.

“We just took a sample to check to decide whether to go or not to go.” We took a very small sample of 2.3 million, and that’s what we found: that even with the facial matches of that sample, only 81% matched,” he stated.

Rev. Fianko, however, clarified that the sample size was not fully representative of the entire database but stressed that it was sufficient to confirm underlying issues requiring urgent attention.

“When you expand the sample, the percentages could either go up or down. It is not a representative sample because it was very small compared to the total number of registrations that was carried out. At least that confirmed that there were true issues with the existing database that needed to be cleaned up, and that is why we needed to do that,” he added.

The revelations come after the NCA disclosed that an audit of SIM card registration data from 2021 to 2023 showed zero fingerprint matches when compared with the national identity database, raising further concerns about the credibility of existing records.